I have been requesting BMC to provide all plugins documentation, what are these and in certain cases OOTB installed but environment does not use or configure. All these OOTB plugins starts throwing errors in arjavaplugin.log. Submitted tickets every time no satisfactory response and eventually give up to let them close with the promise we are working on these plugins.

Unfortunately there is no way to enable or disable through UI except old days way to edit the pluginsvr_config.xml file. Not knowing the dependency of one plugin to another can cause problem if disabled.

I am looking towards experts/gurus and other honorable community members to chime in and share your knowledge.

disabling a plugin via the pluginsvr_config.xml is not recommended, this is the required configuration for when a plugin initialises but not for what makes the actual initialise call.

Different plugins are also run by different Plugin Servers i.e. a Plugin Server runs the individual plugins.

I think you will have trouble getting the full configuration that "can" be done on a Remedy system as it depends fully on what components for the various applications that are installed e.g. SSO, Chat, ITSM, Social, etc, and varies across the different AR System versions i.e. the later version utilise more plugins than the earlier versions.

Also, depending on the version of Remedy determines what plugins are Java based (Alias / XML configuration) and what are still C based (.dll or .so / file configuration).

It is better to understand the sequence of how a plugin works, and what different parts of the configuration "initiates" the plugin - however to explain this all in one go would result in a large reply.

Primarily (but not exclusively), the way a plugin/plugin server is initiated is via the following:

So, to disable you "normally" comment out the related entry in the above configurations to stop the plugin from loading.

It is common for Remedy Admins to disable the plugins not in use by commenting out the Server-Plugin-Alias entry in the AR Configuration settings on the AR Server e.g. you can comment out the Plugin Alias as follows:

Depending on what the plugin is/does, depends on how it is initiated and what Plugin Server runs the plugin.

The "majority" of AR Plugins are initiated from the AR Configuration settings for the AR Server - this is the Plugin Alias entries that you see. Most of the plugins have now been converted to Java, thus you see more Server-Plugin-Alias entries in the AR Configuration files for the later versions.

The number of entries you see depends on the various application you have installed e.g. SSO, Chat, ITSM, Social, etc.

The Java based plugins then use the XML configuration as defined in the Plugin Server configuration (dependent on what Plugin Server is running the plugin e.g. main Remedy Plugin Server, CMDB Plugin Server, etc), so when enabled the system "reads" the XML configuration to know where to find the files required to run the plugin.

The .dll / .so use configuration files on the server itself, in the plugin sub directories.

The AR Monitor file is what initiates the Plugin Server which controls the plugins, along with other external process e.g. SLM Collector, so you have additional configuration which can be done here to disable certain things you don't want to load.

Thanks Carl Wilson for the explanation which we already aware but there is no document to tell us all these plugins, purpose dependency. UI is there but either you can delete or add/modify but can't disable. if you disable in ar.conf it does not work. when we upgrade 10 more plugins are added , which we don't know the purpose and only thing we see plugins throwing ERROR in logs, if i disable then nothing works.

For example Twitter, SBE, AtriumSSO etc prior to version 9.x there was no issue, issues started since 9.x, 18.05 has become painful.

I keep getting authentication error, even i have not configure or enabled social plugins. Question is where are these plugins documented plugin name, purpose, dependency, how to configure, enable / disable or delete it and later want to add then which files path should be added etc.

I had spoken to related BMC team few years back and project is active to document all plugins but may not have high priority to produce the document.